Traditionally, programming of broadcast and cable television and radio, including content (i.e., the video or audio program) and (the placement of) ads in a video or audio signal stream, has followed a linear model. Programming may be linear in the sense that a program begins and is streamed and in progress when a user chooses to view entertainment content. FIG. 1 illustrates a conventional linear or video-on-demand (VOD) model for advertisement placement. Entertainment content 2, when processed as a digital data stream over a cable network, may be divided into a number of time intervals. The time intervals 4 include time reserved for a viewed program (content), such as “Golden Girls.” The intervals 6, 8, 10, represent sections of time reserved for advertisements or “avails.” These “avails” may be viewed as advertisement placement opportunities. As used herein, a “placement opportunity” was traditional called an avail and is sometimes referred to as a slot (spots into slots). A placement opportunity (PO) is a construct that represents an opportunity to insert an advertisement or entertainment content, and defines the rules for that opportunity, such as its duration, interactivity, ownership, and technical constraints.
As used herein, the term “binding” refers to an identification of signals and content within a placement opportunity (PO). PO's are frequently created for broad amounts of content that are not yet published (i.e., any show on TNT network in the evening). When the show airs and a signal is detected, the signal is bound to the relevant PO's for that show.
As used herein, the term “impression” refers to a showing of an advertisement to a single viewer. For example, if a 30 second spot is placed in 50,000 video-on-demand (VOD) streams and it is known that 30,000 of the streams actually played the ad, then 30,000 impressions of that advertisement have been generated.
As used herein, a “status notification” may be, but is not limited to, an HTTP call from a VOD server with a unique ID that was created when a decision was delivered.
As used herein, the term “break” refers to all of the space in a stream between entertainment content. For example, a group of 4 consecutive 30 second spots between 2 segments of “Two and a Half Men” may be considered as a single break.
As used herein, an estimated starting location of a break in a source signal stream is referred to as a signal point. In the context of advertisement placement, these signal points may be referred to as advertisement signal points.
In non-linear systems, such as Video-on-Demand (VOD), the intervals 6, 8, 10 may take on new meanings. The interval 6 is called a pre-roll, i.e., the space in a video that occurs immediately after a user clicks to start a VOD video. The interval 10 is known as a post-roll, i.e., the space after all of the VOD video segments have finished playing. The intervals 8 may be mid-rolls, i.e., mini-breaks in the middle of a VOD video, or may be interstitials, i.e., pod-like locations between consecutive VOD video segments. VOD advertisement placement opportunities may appear based on space, time, content, and user context and may be highly non-linear (i.e., the user chooses to initiate the playing of content and in response, the content starts). All of the intervals 6, 8, 10 in such play lists are ripe for the insertion of advertisements, i.e., advertisement placement opportunities.
FIG. 2 depicts a configuration of a conventional Internet-based cable television infrastructure 200 for performing advertising placement decisions in signal streams. On TV, the advertising network was formerly the national network, the cable network, or the cable operator. However, unlike the Internet, where browsers access/display content and then are separately “referred” to a shared advertisement network, the Internet-based cable television infrastructure 200 selects and assembles both the advertisement and the content together and delivers the combined result to customers' “smart appliances” 202a-202n (e.g., Internet ready televisions, radios, smartphones, tablets, PCs, etc.).
Recently, smart appliances 202a-202n, such as Internet-ready televisions, have become capable of receiving content from Internet streaming services, such as Netflix movies, Pandora streaming radio, etc., over WiFi or direct Ethernet connections. When a user clicks on an icon for an “app” that appears on the television set corresponding to one of these services, the content is streamed to the smart appliance 202a-202n from a content delivery network (CDN) 204 directly to the application running in the smart appliance 202a-202n without the need for a set top box.
A set top box may be configured to decode an analog representation of two states of a digital signal, as is known in the art, that is continuously streamed and pushed to the set top box through a broadcast facility over a coaxial or fiber optic cable and the set top box tunes to that channel and displays the content. When a user watches Internet-delivered program content, a browser within the smart appliance 202a-202n fetching video in predetermined time chunks—generally two sometimes three, sometimes ten second chunks. The fetched chunks of video are seamlessly stitched together dynamically in the app software and then displayed so as to appear as a smooth video on the smart appliance 202a-202n. 
A Multiple System/Service Operator (MSO—a cable TV organization that owns more than one cable system and may prove broadband Internet service) may wish to rebroadcast video streams on smart appliances. Unfortunately, every connected device, including smart appliances, needs to obtain video in the format that it can consume. Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc., have very specific and incompatible formats. To overcome this problem, each of these companies has constructed facilities called content deliver networks (CDN) 204 where a “set top box” for each channel is configured to receive broadcasts from satellites. A signal received by a “set top box” from upstream devices 206 is fed to a transcoder 208 to place the signal in a desired format and to fragment the formatted signal into the predetermined (e.g., 2 second) chunks of data. These chunks are then stored at the CDN 204 on server farms located physically close to where the content is to be delivered.
To identify a particular channel data stream, including times when a program has ended (i.e., an advertisement signal point) and before the next program begins, i.e., a placement opportunity, a q-tone is inserted in the digital stream a predetermined time before the next program begins. The q-tone may be an instance of an SCTE-35 packet. An observer 210, which may be the transcoder 208, informs an advertisement service (ADS) 212 of the arrival of the q-tone for subsequent placement of one or more advertisements into the channel data stream beginning at an advertisement signal point. The advertisement service 212, in turn, is waiting for the subsequent arrival of requests from a CDN 204 to place advertisements into advertisement breaks beginning at an advertisement signal point in the channel data stream.
An MSO prefers to prevent system and therefore signal outages that may originate, for example, an outage of power in a data center. To overcome this problem, the MSO may provide two or more observers of the same signal stream. The MSO may provide for redundant copies of q-tones and signal stream representative of the same channel content and corresponding advertisement signal points within one office, replicated in more than one office at separate locations, or both.
Unfortunately, multiple observers in different data centers may be geographically separate by large distances. As a result, two or more q-tones representative of the same advertisement signal point in the same or redundant signal streams may differ in arrival time to such a degree that one signal point may be indistinguishable from the next advertisement signal point. It becomes increasingly probable that the wrong placement opportunity may be bound to two or more signals having the same meaning.
Conversely, having redundant q-tones that are received at about the same time for the same advertisement signal point in multiple redundant signal streams is wasteful of system resources. The MSO would likewise not desire to have multiple sets of equipment to which bind multiple copies of the same placement opportunity.
Therefore, what is desirable, but has not been provided, is a method and system for eliminating resource redundancy in signal streams of the same meaning (i.e., having the same content and ad breaks) by accurately identifying and distinguishing between two or more advertisement breaks that are representative of the same or different advertisement signal points.